Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.

So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH,  I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.

***

Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.

Once I began working for a beauty magazine, I had to pick it up again—along with every other major woman’s book—as part of my job. I’d flip through the new issues each month, looking for mentions of our advertisers (naturally) and new trends in cosmetics. Doing so over and over for several years gave me an impression of each title’s aim and focus…and I wasn’t surprised to see that Vogue hadn’t changed much in the dozen or so years since I’d last picked it up. Some of the images were gorgeous, of course, but many—with bland, neutral backgrounds – seemed repetitious from issue to issue. The stories on Botox and thousand-dollar clothes reeked of privilege, and it was still a gossip sheet writ large for the Upper East Side.

So naturally, I was curious to see The September Issue, a documentary about the fashion bible shot while the staff pieced together its fall fashion edition in 2007. Now that I oversee photo shoots and judge layouts of my own, I wanted to witness how they did all of that inside the vaunted Condé Nast hallways. I had to determine whether Andre Leon Talley is as ridiculous in person as his headshot and columns make him appear. And of course, Meryl Streep needed a reality check—was the real Anna Wintour actually as heartless and cunning in her disapproval?

After an afternoon at the movie theater, I learned that the answer is no—at least to the latter. While opinionated and swift in her decision-making, she was never cruel to her employees. In several scenes in her own office—which did bear a striking resemblance to the set of The Devil Wears Prada—Wintour sorted through photo options from various designers and made snap decisions about which ones would go and which would stay. Some editors would offer a half-hearted defense for a look they particularly liked, but their protests quickly faded under Wintour’s judgmental glare. She’d smile tightly, and kid around with staffers, but she never seemed to be overtly mean. (Of course, she could have been playing up her softer side for the cameras, but who knows?) Despite mentions of her icy persona in the documentary itself, I still didn’t buy it; too often, women in leadership positions who act decisively and without an overly fuzzy personality get a bum rap when men at similar levels behave the same way and no one bats a perfectly curled eyelash.

No, Anna Wintour’s problem is not that she’s unfriendly—it’s that she has no vision. There’s a certain irony in watching The September Issue now, more than two years after its footage was shot…and probably 18 months or so since print journalism’s gradual slide downward began its current sharp spiral. The scene in the documentary where Vogue’s advertising staff crows about the 644 pages of advertising they sold for the September 2007 issue—enough to qualify as the magazine’s largest ever—is a bit sad knowing that the subsequent two fall fashion-focused editions have been mere shadows of that high mark. Wintour was also able to place spread after spread throughout the issue, seemingly without having to carve any of them up to fit ads or drop any due to space issues. (Many of the spreads are of gorgeous images planned and styled by Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director and the one staffer who dares to push back at Wintour.)

This lack of vision is relevant because the documentary makes such a point of showing how influential Wintour is in the fashion industry—a point with which I doubt many would disagree. She holds private audiences with designers for previews of their collections, and she hand-picked the wunderkind Thakoon for a Vogue partnership with The Gap, propelling him toward his career in couture. As for the magazine, her main contribution is underscored as turning its focus toward celebrity culture, especially by putting famous females on the cover. (Indeed, the cover girl in September 2007 was the starlet Sienna Miller.)

But that change is one that took place in the 1990s, and something I now see lambasted in various corners as the new millennium brought on a constant rotation of starlets such as Miller, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johanssen. Over the last two years, as all magazines (especially those pushing high fashion) have taken a nosedive, Vogue has gone retro with covers featuring supermodels such as Linda Evangelista—the very thing that Wintour was lauded for reversing. Did that move bring greater financial success to Vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s? Apparently so, given the company line from Condé Nast as it’s stated in the film. As my movie-going companion pointed out, focusing on celebrities may have helped Vogue make a bigger penetration in Middle American markets that don’t necessarily follow high fashion—but given the magazine’s remaining insistence on following the New York social scene (which still alienates this blue state native), I’m not so sure that helped retain that audience.

Other than that decade-old accomplishment, what does Wintour bring to the pages of Vogue? After years of following the magazine and 90 minutes in a movie theater, I don’t know. Yes, she’s a strong leader who seems to know exactly what she wants, and quickly—but in all of those scenes where she made snap judgments, she gave no reasons behind her decision. Or, more accurately, none other than “This doesn’t seem necessary” or “There’s too much black.” While creative editing on the documentarians’ part may have a hand in this depiction, she seems like nothing more than a dictator whose word stands based on a stale military victory. Late in the film, she decides to nix the results of a photo shoot on color blocking that Coddington oversaw and order a reshoot—with apparently no new direction given. (Wintour felt free to cut multiple pages of many of Coddington’s shoots; after removing a number of spreads from an ethereal ‘20s shoot, Coddington remarked that Wintour had just put the kibosh on about $50,000 worth of work. It’s hard to believe such waste would fly in today’s magazine market.) The previous color block shoot had been shot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with bright hues all around; the reworked version appeared to have been completed in a Long Island studio with a neutral background—just like any number of Vogue spreads over the past few years.

It’s not a stretch to say that Coddington may have more artistic vision than Wintour does. The film quotes one Vogue staffer as saying that there’s no one else who can style shoot and produce beautiful photography in the same way that Coddington does—perhaps a testament to the time she spent as a model in London in her youth. It could even be argued that the film makes an argument that Coddington is best qualified to lead Vogue, perhaps while leaving Wintour a place to continue influencing fashion. Coddington cut an imposing figure in the film as she stood looking out over a regal French garden, her mass of kinky red hair flowing in the wind, before overseeing a shoot on the latest haute couture. While standing there, she lamented that her vision of a more romantic world in Vogue had dated her, while the currents of fashion (heralded by Wintour) passed her by.

But after seeing the striking work she produced for the September 2007 issue—both published and unpublished—it’s painful to think of what she may have had to sacrifice in her concepts and vision to suit smaller magazine sizes since then.

And this is where Wintour falls flat. She had one idea—the embrace of celebrity culture—that once brought Vogue great success and didn’t sustain the brand after the bottom fell out. And what’s happened since then? Competitor Elle won the race between beauty and fashion books for the September issue this year, scoring more advertising pages than Vogue. It might be prudent to do a comparison between the ads in the two magazines, to determine which advertisers Elle reeled in that Vogue did not. I highly doubt they brought in more high-end labels and retailers, so maybe the idea should be to aim a little lower, toward the affordable fashion that real people need these days.

But as Coddington illuminated in the film’s last plot point, those folks are hardly seen in Vogue anymore. She and photographer Patrick DeMarchelier enlisted the help of one of the documentary’s cameramen to appear in a shot for the color block shoot, which was then Photoshopped to appear as though a model were in the same frame. Wintour made a comment that her staff would also need to Photoshop out the cameraman’s slight belly paunch, an order that Coddington quickly reversed.

It’s a new world for print media, and The September Issue is a time capsule of how it used to be. So far, though, this new world still includes Wintour and her vague, old-school ideas of what works. But in order for Vogue to survive, it’s going to realize that it needs to change course as well.

After graduating from college, I largely fell out of the habit of writing reviews. But in 2007, I saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which is now one of my favorite movies. It got my brain racing, and I had to write the following. It’s longer and a little more involved than a typical DTH review would have been (I can thank the media studies degree for that), but here it is anyway—in all of its G. Dub glory.

(And I gave it four and a half feet.)

***

When Robert Ludlum first wrote the novels that immortalized the exploits of embattled spy Jason Bourne, his title character roamed a world wrought with Cold War fears and conflict in Vietnam. The Bourne Identity, the first movie that placed Matt Damon in the role, came on the heels of a new era—post 9/11 terrorism fears. And, as we all know, it’s been a rollercoaster ride of suspicious-looking neighbors, confiscated gels and liquids, and wiretapped phone calls ever since then.

So, in a way, The Bourne Ultimatum is exactly the kind of film that Americans need to see right now—and the kind that they don’t need to see at all.

Picking up right where The Bourne Supremacy, the second film in the series, left off, Damon returns as the amnesiac Bourne, the highly trained government assassin who is still trying to piece together his past. He hobbles injured around Moscow after Supremacy’s bravura car chase scene, while a team of CIA sleuths back in the U.S. tries to track him down before he can sabotage their top-secret program even further.

That team includes Joan Allen, wonderfully reprising her role as the sympathetic Pamela Landy, and new-to-the-series David Strathairn, who plays against type as the flinty Noah Vosen, a deputy director determined to bring an end to Bourne’s travels no matter the cost. The twosome track Bourne from London to Madrid to Tangier before his desire to know who he was drives him to New York, where Landy and Vosen are waiting for him.

It’s not a surprise that over the course of five years and three films, the franchise has wonderfully matured. The first film was entertaining yet unremarkable, but it was when director Paul Greengrass took the helm for Supremacy that Bourne’s complex story got a needed jolt thanks to jittery camera angles and bone-crunching fights that place you right in Bourne’s well-worn shoes. Greengrass takes it to the next level in Ultimatum without trying to outdo what’s already been done; while it’s tempting to roll your eyes when the newest set of flashbacks powers up and big CIA muckety-mucks start barking at their underlings to “FIND JASON BOURNE,” there’s a new sense of desperation flooding every scene. Instead of capping the film with a car chase similar to the jaw-dropper that ended Supremacy, Ultimatum runs its last chase with at least 20 minutes to go, instead ending with a scene on a Manhattan rooftop that satisfyingly brings the trilogy full circle. (I would recommend catching up with the previous two movies before seeing Ultimatum; not only will those who pay close attention get a nice reward, but there’s a definite sense of finality to this one.)

Ultimatum continues to make a name for itself in a number of ways: The locales are different, the score (by John Powell) incorporates familiar melodies from the earlier movies yet infuses them with new energy, and Damon proves once and for all that he has enough action-flick know-how to pair with his everyman appeal for an intriguingly real, nuanced character. While Bourne continues to walk away from horrendous car crashes and intense sparring matches, he does so with bloody scratches and a limp. When Bourne pairs up with Nicky Parsons (played by a fairly lifeless Julia Stiles), he doesn’t bed her like a James Bond-type character might; instead, he looks at her with eyes that are still searching for his dead girlfriend Marie, who was killed at the beginning of the second movie—an eternity in the testosterone-fueled world of the typical thriller.

And most importantly, he doesn’t kill indiscriminately. When escaping Moroccan authorities, he throws a can of spray paint onto a fire and pushes away those people standing nearby. Every life he takes is considered and mourned, even if he kills someone who was trained the same way he was—by conditioning to remove the slightest bit of human remorse. This is what makes Ultimatum hugely comforting—and at the same time, incredibly frightening.

To his credit, Strathairn fully inhabits a heartless role, but it’s difficult to see his character as anything other than a representation of the current administration. (With Greengrass including a flashback scene of Bourne undergoing a waterboarding procedure, it’s tough not to draw that conclusion.) Vosen issues kill orders for U.S. citizens and operatives on nothing more than mere suspicion, and when Landy dares to ask how far he’ll go, he bites back, “Until we win.”

We also catch wind of a report that Bourne resisted his initial training, which intended to beat the conscience out of him and evidently malfunctioned, resulting in the tortured hero we see today. But this plot point begs an important question: Why is conscience something worth killing? Who exactly are Bourne and his ilk being asked to kill that would require it gone? The overwhelming sense of reality in The Bourne Ultimatum makes this tough to ponder. It’s nice knowing that someone working in our name has one, but troubling that our government would consider it a handicap.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Ultimatum is meant as a political statement, or anything other than what it is: a hugely entertaining movie. A rooftop chase scene in Morocco dazzles the senses with unbelievable camera work and a heart-pounding soundtrack, and an early sequence at London’s busiest train station looks as though as it were filmed alongside regular commuters making their way home. Bourne instructs a British journalist (those nimby-pimby sorts) on how to make his way out of the terminal while ducking sweeping surveillance cameras and lurking thugs, and it’s hilarious watching Bourne use the same precise training he received against those who gave it to him as they scratch their heads in bewilderment. They can’t believe that one of their own has turned against them.

Which possibly proves that in the end, our greatest danger could really be ourselves.

When it comes to the hordes who pack up their cars and move to Los Angeles, I like to think that I don’t fit the cliché. A year ago, I decided to make a change and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area—and my parents’ comfortable suburban home. L.A. offered the same good food, the weather, the politics that I couldn’t stand to leave. Best of all, I didn’t have to change my license plates.

Really, it was just an exercise in laziness.

I carried the typical NorCal resident’s cynicism for anything Hollywood, and I came here with no desire to see my name in lights. I don’t have a screenplay to sell. Getting into the hottest club isn’t my ultimate goal in life. Somehow, I thought this would be evident soon enough; that I’d get a steady job and join the throngs of regular people sitting on the freeway on our ways to work. I’d put the same amount of thought into a place to live—after all, I’m the type who drives my car down Rodeo Drive even though it rattles and is missing a side mirror. Something nice and comfortable, no matter the ZIP code, would suit me just fine.

My home base at first was a friend’s couch in Mid-City; from there, the Palms looked like the best option, though my roommate and I didn’t restrict ourselves too much. I spent my weekdays temping and looking for work, and on the weekends, the two of us drove around with a map and a notepad, charting addresses and bedrooms and dollar amounts.

We started with Craig’s List and Westside Rentals—the old stalwarts—but after we found that many of the best-looking places weren’t listed anywhere online, we just started calling numbers on For Rent signs while idling at the curb. Thanks to that strategy, we found a gorgeous, refurbished duplex in Silver Lake going for half the price it could reasonably get. (Seriously, it had central air and a washer/dryer included!)

After two days of gloating over our good luck, we returned with our applications, only to find that our potential landlord had already promised the place to some neighbors, who caught the same sign on his garage door while walking down the street. In the crush of our disappointment, we figured that this was surely the first time that anything in L.A. had ever been accomplished by walking.

Losing that place was when it started to hit me—I actually wanted some of that L.A. glitz and glamour I had been so sure I didn’t need. It didn’t matter to me that Silver Lake was reportedly a hotbed for hipsters. I wanted the gorgeous apartment with the view of downtown. I wanted the leafy, charming neighborhood and a home with character. L.A. is renowned for being a place where almost everyone driving the streets isn’t quite pretty enough, quite charming enough, quite whatever enough.

I still didn’t want the acting career, the film credit, the nod from the bouncer. All I wanted was for L.A. to deem me important enough to get that apartment.

We continued our search deflated and half-hearted, knowing that nothing we could find and afford would live up, but also needing to find a place before we became permanent refugees. From the far outskirts of Santa Monica to Valley Village to Echo Park, we toured apartments in our price range and plunked down the money to apply to several perfectly acceptable places, which were beyond sterile and boring in comparison. Our passion for the search had slipped away along with that fabulous apartment.

But then came a moment we couldn’t even have scripted—that same potential landlord called us back. His next-door neighbor had just gotten notice from his tenants and would have a duplex with the same number of bedrooms (and the same price) available in a month. By this point, we had credit checks and deposits pending for other places, and an even more anxious deadline looming—I had to be off my friend’s couch in two days, because she was moving as well. So, my roommate and I rushed over, breathless, trying to temper our excitement for fear of offending the karma gods once again, but failing miserably.

And this place turned out to be better than the first. Old Spanish architecture, beautiful antique furniture included, an expansive back deck, sizable bedrooms. Having learned our lesson the first time, we submitted our applications that day, before anyone else even knew the place existed—and not knowing exactly how we would bridge a month-long housing gap.

On a deceptively clear morning in late May, I woke up and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. We had approval for one of the sterile, boring apartments and could have moved in that day if we wanted, but our names were still in the hopper for the Silver Lake place, even though its availability was a month away. Just the credit and reference checks—and a small shred of hope—remained. While we waited, I called around to executive and long-term apartment complexes, saying my “significant other” and I might need a place to stay for one month, starting that night. Many laughed at my request, but wished me good luck. I finally secured a space for us at the cheapest place I could find—an ExtendedStayAmerica in an industrial section of Gardena. The placement of our accommodations on a map was a bit frightening to this SoCal newbie, but we didn’t have much of a choice.

That afternoon, while I helped my friend load up her moving van, I got the call—my roommate and I had the Silver Lake place. If we wanted it. There was absolutely no question that we did, but in our elation, we realized that our next challenge we would be getting over our fear of L.A. geography. We called and canceled the sterile, boring apartment with glee—but when we opened the door to our one-bed hotel room and saw how much room that one bed actually took up, we started counting down the days for the next month.

That time was spent cooking pasta in a kitchenette the size of a closet, grabbing clothes out of drawers while trying not to surf off an inflatable mattress and chatting up college basketball with the security guard in the lobby. We received a full education on the virtues of the 405 vs. the 110 and battled the supposedly complimentary wifi a nightly basis. Yeah, the parking lot was a bit scary at night, but even over the course of a month, we managed to make ourselves a home there.

Yet when we finally received the keys to our beautiful apartment, the first thing I did was sink to the floor and hug the carpet. My roommate followed, and we just laid there, awestruck. After everything that had happened, in L.A. terms, I had finally made it.

***

Speaking of articles I wrote on spec, this is something I put together for the Sunday magazine of the Los Angeles Times. I actually met the magazine’s editor at an event in which personal essays were the main topic and sent it in to him soon after, and he declined. The first-person piece is a form that I was still trying to get the hang of—and I’m still not sure I have it down—so it wasn’t a surprise. But like the trip to Rome and Cairo that was mentioned last week, this was a situation that had to be immortalized in writing somehow. And both events took place in 2005, which was quite a banner year.

Of course, I have to acknowledge the fact that there are three of us in the above photo and only two roommates mentioned in the course of the story (hence the sic in the subhead). Truth is, the actual situation was a bit more complicated than this story lets on—my friend (on the left) and I (in the middle) did move down to L.A. from the Bay Area, and we were the ones going around on apartment searches. But we ended up with a third roommate—my friend with whom I originally stayed when I first arrived in Southern California—and the situation only arose because the great place we found happened to have three bedrooms.

See how complicated this is? And why it made more sense to streamline the narrative?

Still, all the nuances of the story needed acknowledgment…especially because there’s a good chance my roommates could read this. (xoxo, ladies!)

When my friend and I announced our plans to take a two-week trip to Rome and Cairo, the concerned voices of friends and family across the country all chimed in with opinions.

“You’re two young women traveling by yourselves. Two young American women,” they would say. “How on earth will you be safe over there?”

We weren’t worried. The friends we would be staying with in both locales were young American women themselves, each of whom had been studying in their respective cities for at least nine months. They knew how to conduct themselves; we figured we’d just follow their cues.

“But the Italian men will prey on you, and the Egyptians will just hate you,” the voices continued to say. We were instructed to learn the phrase “No, I will not marry you, and please take your hands off my behind” in Italian, and “I am a Canadian” in Arabic.

In the end, the reverse seemed to be true. Identifying our national origins in Cairo proved not to be a problem, but it was when our gender encountered the odd balance of power between the sexes in Egypt’s Muslim society that things took a wrong turn.

After weeks of careful planning, our plane happened to drop us off in Rome two days before the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Millions of pilgrims from all over Europe and the rest of the world were flooding into the city at the same time. On the train from the airport into the city, other passengers assumed that we were there for the same purpose and chatted us up on recent events.

We had to tell them that not only were we there simply to sightsee, but that we weren’t even Catholic. On the day of the funeral, we made an effort to walk in the opposite direction of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The young Italian men of the city, whose loudly amorous attentions we were thoroughly warned about, seemed to be in mourning for their Padre Santo and kept their observations on our physiques to themselves. Only on our last day there did one slip, telling my friend he wished to be the cone of gelato she held in her hands. Like our hostess had demonstrated, we simply walked on without giving the admirer any acknowledgement.

But to our surprise, sentiments like these permeated the dusty air of Cairo for the entire week we were there. Even with the anti-American attitudes of the Middle East, we felt free to tell those who asked where we were from. One merchant in the Khan al-Khalili, a popular bazaar that had been targeted by a bomber the week before our arrival, even apologized for the actions of another Muslim who shares his first name—Osama.

Our gender proved to be much more of a sticking point. In Cairo, women freely walk the streets, though many don’t do it alone. And while Western wear is popular, most of a woman’s body, including the head, is covered. Only the occasional Egyptian woman wore a full burqa, where only her eyes were visible.

As our hostess there had instructed, we only brought conservative clothing. Our sleeves were always at least three-quarter length, and nothing was too tight. As the weather got warmer, our resolve slipped—but with borrowed shawls, we still passed the conservative dress test as we walked around town.

It was easy to resent fellow tourists who disembarked from air-conditioned tour buses in shorts and t-shirts.

But even with the utmost attention paid to proper Cairo etiquette for women, we still felt the weight of our gender pressing down on us. Our guidebooks told us that thanks to the importing of Western movies and television shows, Muslim men often expect Western women to be loose with their morals. And our interactions indicated as much.

Everywhere we went, there was the sense that someone was watching you. Even Muslim women with head coverings passing by gave us once-overs. Cabbies and vendors tried to get our attention by calling out names that sexual harassment manuals have made scarce in this country. And while visiting an American-style nightclub with our hostess and some of her friends, the stares of the waiters made the prospect of dancing to the familiar American music daunting.

On a day trip to Alexandria, our anxiety reached a fever pitch. The cool glances we attracted in Cairo became downright hostile there—men shouted at us and tried to get our attention as we walked down the street. Children came up to us to say hello and ran away giggling, as though they’d just completed a dare.

The most disturbing incident happened while navigating a taxi ride, which was always an interesting Egyptian experience. When I attempted to hand a cabbie five pounds for a five-minute ride—already more than was customary—he grabbed my arm to demand more money. I shook him free and we walked off, but the cabbie did a U-turn in the middle of the road. I whispered to my friend under my breath: “He’s coming after us!” The folks in that district of Alexandria had little sympathy for us, just watching us power by.

The city did have its moments, including the Egyptian ex-pat who was back in town to visit his parents and told us about his time living in the United States. We talked with him while taking refuge in a tea room, and he sympathized with us for the difficulties we’d encountered that day.

But by that point, we were ready to cut our day short and hop on a train back to Cairo. If we could have, we would have hopped a plane back to the U.S. that very day.

All we wanted was for the staring and catcalls to stop. The nagging questions of our relatives were whispers by comparison.

***

This is a piece I wrote on spec for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, the same year that my friend Meredith and I took this trip. There was a possibility of getting this in the Travel section, though I soon learned that going to Italy and Egypt is so common that it really doesn’t catch the attention of any editors who cover that beat. That’s fine, because we had a great and—as you can see—educational time.

Oddly enough, this may have been the only piece I wrote about that trip. Which is odd, because it was epic.

And yes, I took the pictures. Along with a ton more, which you can see on my Flickr page.

There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.

And I, for one, could not be more thrilled. A native Californian, the closest I can claim Southern heritage is through my mother, a Tar Heel born and bred in a rural mill town outside Charlotte, N.C. I also spent four years in North Carolina while I was in college. But the closest I ever came to reclaiming that heritage was through the dozens of church cookbooks my mother had collected from her hometown. When I was in high school and antsy to leave California, I’d flip through them, imagining the miraculous tastes I’d come to associate with the two weeks we spent in North Carolina every summer. Eventually, red velvet became my specialty.

It took a few tries—I went from the recipe in the Lutheran cookbook to the Southern Baptist and back again—but once I got the hang of it, my red velvet cakes became legendary. My mother began commissioning me to make them as treats for the neighbors every Christmas. And I didn’t mind; there was something so therapeutic about sculpting that cream cheese frosting over the cake fresh out of the Bundt pan and watching the first drops of red food coloring streak across the batter circulating through the Kitchen Aid.

Red velvet wasn’t something I got to experience in college—dorm kitchens aren’t so useful for that—but I was excited to discover that it had caught on in California once I had graduated and settled in the Los Angeles area. One of my roommates was from Texas, so we indulged our Southern sides with this latest L.A. trend. We trekked all over the city, sampling what various bakeries had to offer. My birthday “cakes” that first year came from one uber-hip institution called Doughboys; my friends and I went to the beach and chowed down on the moist cupcakes while watching the summer sun set into the Pacific Ocean. It was the perfect melding of the two places that I consider home.

But as our search took us further and more bakeries opened across the city, I came across a troubling phenomenon—faulty red velvet cake. The majority of cupcakes we sampled were bitter and dry, taking on more of a brownish hue than a red one. Yet at the same time, the local media kept talking about the wonders of red velvet—a sentiment I didn’t disagree with, but I couldn’t understand how they could believe it with such disappointing cupcakes in hand. I finally got a clue on LAist, a local blog where, in a guide to navigating the hysteria surrounding area bakeries, one writer described red velvet as “a light chocolate cake.”

For me, there’s no way that anyone could believe that red velvet cake is comparable to chocolate. Yes, many traditional Southern recipes for red velvet cake call for a small amount of cocoa, but it did not seem possible to me that its complex flavors—the dense buttery taste, the dark notes that play across the tongue, the slightest bit of fruit punch flavor that’s probably just a psychological reaction to the color of the cake—could ever be mistaken for something so run-of-the-mill. It actually made me sad that my fellow Angelenos had been led to believe that red velvet wasn’t nearly as wonderful as it could be.

The final straw came when I went to New York City for a long weekend, and on my first night there, took the subway from my hotel down to Greenwich Village. There, I waited in line for 20 minutes just to be let into the mother ship—Magnolia Bakery, the famous Manhattan cupcake emporium with its own cookbook that Carrie Bradshaw visited and received its own rap on Saturday Night Live. After I escaped with my bounty of red velvet cupcakes, I retreated to my hotel room for what I was sure was going to be a moving experience. One bite and…confusion set in. What I was holding in my hand was not only a bitter chocolate “red velvet” cupcake, but it was topped with whipped cream frosting. The Lutheran church ladies almost certainly screamed in horror at that moment.

The experience called for a cleansing of sorts, so once I returned to L.A., I pulled out my own recipe for good measure. My roommate attempted her grandmother’s recipe, with its traditional scoop of cocoa, and I trusted my time-tested one without a trace of chocolate whatsoever. Both were splendid, the chocolate in the one recipe simply serving to enhance the taste of what makes red velvet red velvet, even if it’s not something so easy to describe.

Maybe, in the end, the chocolate-ifying of red velvet in California is nothing more than what happens to other ethnic cuisine when it hits the United States; you’d be hard-pressed to find American-style pizza in Italy or egg drop soup in China. But to me, those are variations on an original idea that have developed and matured into new dishes. To me, red velvet will never be mistaken for chocolate—it is a flavor, a being, all on its own. No matter what the trendy people say.

***

So this is a piece I’ve had on my laptop for a few years. Every once in a while, I would go back and tinker with something else, but only two people have read it over that time. And while the cupcake thing still seems to be going somewhat strong—at least here in L.A.—it will inevitably fall out of favor…so by the time I have the time to shop this around, it’ll be horribly out of date. So you all got it instead.

Hope you enjoyed it…and that you didn’t read it on an empty stomach.